Today's media presentation software offer tools that enable their users to construct media presentations including video sequences having a selection of multiple photographs and/or video clips. These tools allow the user to construct slide shows and videos, typically combining them with audio, to create a compelling multimedia presentation.
Most of today's tools offer the user a timeline-oriented user interface for the construction of the media presentation. A timeline is typically a horizontal band that contains time scale markings. In today's systems, the user typically drags content from a library of available content and drops it on the timeline using a pointing device. Once the desired content has been added to the timeline, a media presentation can be rendered. The resulting media presentation is made available to the user for playback or can be published for sharing to other friends and family.
The drag-and-drop interface, while easy to use for simple applications, becomes very cumbersome if the user has large amounts of media spread across multiple libraries. The user must drag each content item to the timeline, and then arrange the content within the timeline prior to rendering.